Mary Winsor

Research Interests

I am interested in the history of systematics, especially in its relationship to evolution. In the centuries before Darwin, what sense did naturalists make of the resemblances linking organisms? To what extent did accepting evolution alter the practice of classifying living things? Textbooks usually answer such questions with some version of the “essentialism story” popularized by Ernst Mayr, but I have challenged the accuracy of this story. Today there are philosophers and biologists who suppose that before 1859, systematists can only have counted overall similarities, since the criterion of common ancestry that now underpins monophyletic groups did not exist. I am currently studying the concept of taxonomic “affinity,” a crucial idea in the early 19th century that corrects that mistake.